Moby Dick: or, the White Whale eBook

Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in
the Pequod’s main-rigging dimly guided our way;
till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several
more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual
orders for securing it for the night, and then handing
his lantern to a seaman, went his way into the cabin,
and did not come forward again until morning.

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain
Ahab had evinced his customary activity, to call it
so; yet now that the creature was dead, some vague
dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed
working in him; as if the sight of that dead body
reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and
though a thousand other whales were brought to his
ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand,
monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought
from the sound on the Pequod’s decks, that all
hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep; for
heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and
thrust rattling out of the port-holes. But by
those clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not
the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to
the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale
now lies with its black hull close to the vessel’s,
and seen through the darkness of the night, which obscured
the spars and rigging aloft, the two—­ship
and whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks,
whereof one reclines while the other remains standing.*

A little item may as well be related here.
The strongest and most reliable hold which the ship
has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the
flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that
part is relatively heavier than any other (excepting
the side-fins), its flexibility even in death, causes
it to sink low beneath the surface; so that with the
hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to
put the chain round it. But this difficulty
is ingeniously overcome: a small, strong line
is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end,
and a weight in its middle, while the other end is
secured to the ship. By adroit management the
wooden float is made to rise on the other side of
the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the
chain is readily made to follow suit; and being slipped
along the body, is at last locked fast round the smallest
part of the tail, at the point of junction with its
broad flukes or lobes.

If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so
far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate,
flushed with conquest, betrayed an unusual but still
good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle
was he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior,
quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management
of affairs. One small, helping cause of all
this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest.
Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately
fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate.